“Well, you don’t need to worry, Melanie. He won’t always be this way.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been caring for Elwood for a long time.”
“But maybe this time it’s different. Maybe this time he actually needs people around him, rather than the other way around. I mean, it’s not like you’re a doctor.”
June tucked in her bottom lip and then gathered up the tablet, pen, and glass, and stood, grimacing as she did so. “That’s true, but it’s not like you are, either. And while both Elwood and I appreciate your concern, the decisions he makes regarding his personal life are none of your business. They’re not even any of my business. Besides. You have enough to worry about with your own troubled life, don’t you?”
The question stung and left Melanie momentarily speechless.
“You know,” June added when Melanie said nothing, “I think I might try to get in a few hours of sleep after all. Before Elwood awakes. Good night.”
While Melanie was still trying to formulate a reply, June turned from her and went inside the house, closing the patio door softly behindher.
December 18,1956
7
In the week that Eva had been helping June she had, among other things, made several meals for Elwood Blankenship, washed and dried his laundry, cleaned his bathroom, and tidied his writing room, which was upstairs and across the hall from his bedroom—the door to which she had never seen open.
She hadn’t minded the extra work, though Melanie’s charge to find out if Elwood was being properly treated wasn’t ever far from her thoughts. Unlike Melanie, June—who spent most afternoons on the sofa with a heating pad—had truly needed help with the house. Eva had even offered to come in on Sunday, not one of her usual working days. She hadn’t gotten bored once or found herself at any point cleaning a room that was already clean.
In truth, she liked working for June, despite the lingering question of whether all was well inside the Blankenship house. She liked the recipes June had her make for Elwood’s meals, written on spotted, fading recipe cards that had belonged to June’s grandmother. She liked the music June listened to. She liked the loved homeyness of the Blankenship furniture and décor.
She liked Elwood’s cat, Algernon, who often sidled up to her to rub his whiskered face on her ankles—an unexplainable phenomenon to June. The cat apparently usually excelled in grouchiness and in swatting earrings and water glasses off tabletops.
And Eva could not help but like June, too, who, though in obvious pain, didn’t complain about it. She didn’t complain about anything.
It was hard to imagine June was the kind of person to intentionally harm someone. Eva had witnessed firsthand the kind of person who could do that.
Yet every afternoon when Eva left the Blankenship house, Melanie would catch her before she headed down the hill to the bus stop to ask her if she’d actually seen Elwood. Every afternoon she told her no. For all her lovely qualities, June was adamant that Eva not bother Elwood. At all. The couch where June spent her afternoons offered an unobstructed view of the first half of the stairs that led to the second story. Eva went up those stairs only the few times June told her to, and if she’d tried to contact Elwood through his closed bedroom door, June would have heard it.
But Eva did tell Melanie she’d seen evidence that Elwood was moving about the house during the many hours she wasn’t inside it. Socks and underwear lay tousled in his laundry hamper. Damp towels hung on the rungs in the upstairs bathroom that he used. His bedroom slippers lay askew by the back door. Pipe ash rested in the tray that sat on a little table by the corner armchair. Two dirty dinner plates from the night before were always sitting in the kitchen sink when she arrived, along with two wineglasses, two coffee mugs, two cereal bowls, and two spoons. Two of everything, really, waiting to be washed.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Melanie had said on Day Three.“You need to try Elwood’s bedroom door before June’s back improves and you’re done there.”
“She told me not to disturb him.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Melanie said in an exasperated voice. “Elwood is not some kind of madman who can’t handle seeing a stranger! He just doesn’t go outside. And it’s not a disturbance to ask someone if there’s anything you can do for them.”
So on the fourth afternoon, and while June was sitting on the couch with pages of Elwood’s current screenplay to proofread, Eva did attempt to make contact from the hall side of his bedroom door, behind which she heard the sound of a radio playing and the whirring of an oscillating fan. She tapped on the door as lightly as she could and said softly, “Mr. Blankenship? Is there anything I can get for you? Mr. Blankenship?”
There’d been no answer.
With a trembling hand and a whispered prayer she’d tried the doorknob. It would not turn.
Melanie hadn’t liked that when Eva told her this an hour later.
“But maybe he couldn’t hear me knocking or my voice,” Eva said. “I had to be quiet or June would’ve heard me. He had music playing and there was a fan on in the room, too. I could hear it. And if he really doesn’t want to be disturbed, he would in fact lock his door, wouldn’t he?”
“You need to try again tomorrow,” Melanie said. “Wait until June is going to the bathroom and is behind a closed door. Knock louder.”
Eva said she would try.
But by that next day, the fifth day, Eva was beginning to wonder if the problem wasn’t that Elwood Blankenship was possibly locked behind his bedroom door and perhaps chained to his bed.
It was that Elwood Blankenship wasn’t inside that house at all.
